Newt News

This morning, I released an update for the Loki build of Newt OS Studio. This update isn't so much an update as it is a modification. What I mean by that is, this release changes the software selection to improve the user experience, and to ensure the software used in Newt OS is actively developed.

Late last year, Yorba, the company behind Geary and Shotwell, closed its doors. You can read their announcement ﻿here.

As Yorba is no longer active, their projects have been inactive for close to a year now. Geary has been taken up by the elementary OS team directly as Pantheon Mail, which has replaced Geary in Newt OS in order to reflect this transition.

However, Shotwell has not been directly adopted by any project. It is officially a Gnome project, but there has been no development on their part. While it is still a wonderful program, it will show its age as time goes on. This has lead me to look for an alternative to replace Shotwell in the future. Luckily, the elementary OS team maintains a fork of Shotwell as Pantheon Photos. Photos will replace Shotwell in the next major release of Newt OS, and has replaced Shotwell in the latest release of Newt OS Studio Loki.

Below you can find a screenshot of the new Photos app.

While Photos has many improvements over Shotwell, removing Shotwell meant removing the default image viewer for Newt OS. The Gnome image viewer has also been included to fill this role.

You can install these applications in your current Newt OS installations by running the following command:sudo zypper install pantheon-photos eog eog-plugins

Let me know what you think about this latest change. I think it is for the better.

Just a short notice that you can now find the configuration files used in Loki on Github. At this point, you will have to download the software components separately (links are available in the Readme on Github) If you encounter any problems, please submit an issue via Github.